In The News

Case shows progress amid deadly statistics
By Margery Eagan
Boston Herald Columnist
Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Pure self-defense, her lawyer said. Years and years of physical and emotional battering, said nearly 30 witnesses before a Barnstable County grand jury.

But those who work in domestic violence cases said yesterday that not so many years ago - try 15, certainly 20 - that would not have been enough to free Dr. Ann Gryboski, a Cape Cod physician who admitted shooting her husband in their home last Easter after he attacked her when she tried to break up a fight between him and their grown son.

Her freedom, they said, was not won because she had the wherewithal to hire Kevin Reddington, a top-notch lawyer, to plead her case. Or because she appeared in court bruised and battered the day after the killing - a result, Gryboski said, of her husband pummeling her as she drove her Saab with their toddler grandson in the back seat.

Ann Grybowski never reported any of this to police, nor filed for a restraining order - the sort of lapses that, once, might have ruined her case.

The big reason charges against Gryboski were dropped, domestic violence experts believe: “I think we understand this more than we ever have,” says Stacey Kabat, a longtime battered women’s advocate.

We may still ask: Why did she stay? Why didn’t she tell? But most of us have learned something about battered women syndrome, says Mary Lauby, head of statewide anti-violence coalition Jane Doe Inc. We know it’s possible for someone to live in terror in their own home and be unable to escape.

This knowledge led to the release last week as well of Mary Winkler, the mother of three who was convicted of manslaughter in the shotgun slaying of her minister husband. Winkler, 33, served but 67 days after a jury heard her testfiy about years of abuse and rejected what Tennessee prosecutors had wanted, a murder conviction.

Yet here’s the irony, says Lauby: The number of domestic violence killings in Massachusetts has more than doubled since 2005 (from 15 murders and 19 deaths, including suicides, in 2005 to 29 murders and 36 deaths a little more than halfway through 2007).

In the same week that Winkler and Gryboski were freed, there were four apparent domestic murders here.

On Saturday, Dorothy Philbrook, 65, of Everett was shot to death in her driveway, allegedly by an ex-husband who routinely threatened her, but who no one ever imagined was capable of murder.

In Brockton, two women were allegedly killed by ex-boyfriends, Lauby said. One was Rosa Andrade; the other was Carlita Chaney, 27, who had two young children with her alleged killer.

Their stories barely made the papers.

Meanwhile, the state’s 26 emergency shelters are nearly always full. Victims and their children routinely go to other states for shelter. Over three years federal funding for domestic violence has been cut 15 percent and a modest state increase has not made up the difference.

It is progress that we better understand the plight of the battered woman, said Lauby. But we are clearly losing ground in preventing their murders. “Please give out our number,” she said. It is 617-248-0922. The Web site is JANEDOE.org.

On Sunday, Ann Gryboski’s parents said their daughter is eager to return to practicing medicine. Yesterday, one of her longtime patients said she “and every other patient I know is just waiting for her to come back. It’s not a question of if, just when . . . She is a wonderful doctor,” said the patient. She also said she never knew any one of her patients who blamed Gryboski. Not ever.